S.A. foes of Obamacare urge backing for Ted Cruz

Updated 11:21 pm, Friday, September 27, 2013

Patty Gibbons of the Republican Party of Bexar County speaks about her opposition to Obamacare at The Lion & Rose pub in the Sonterra neighborhood on Friday.

Patty Gibbons of the Republican Party of Bexar County speaks about her opposition to Obamacare at The Lion & Rose pub in the Sonterra neighborhood on Friday.

Photo: Billy Calzada / San Antonio Express-News

S.A. foes of Obamacare urge backing for Ted Cruz

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Tea party and GOP activists in Bexar County joined Friday to condemn the federal Affordable Care Act and urge voters to support Sen. Ted Cruz's efforts to defund the program.

They also shared their dismay with Sen. John Cornyn, the other Texas Republican in the Senate, for not sufficiently backing Cruz, who this week gave a 21-hour Senate speech against the insurance program known as Obamacare.

Ray Wilkinson, a businessman and San Antonio Tea Party board member, said “with Obamacare, an established business is having to change its successful model in order to deal with this mandate, and that's unfair.”

He said voters “are being misled down the road by the Democratic party through this socialism that is occurring in our country, and Obamacare is just another part of that.”

Wilkinson, who operates landscape and irrigation businesses, said the legislation “is having us consider strongly using outside subcontractors to perform the work.”

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Cruz, he said, “is the only senator that is standing up and doing what he said he was going to do when he was elected. We're very disappointed in Cornyn” for not going along with Cruz's procedural fight to defund Obamacare.

Wilkinson was joined at a news conference by one GOP official, Patty Gibbons, who serves on the Bexar County Republican Party's management committee representing Precinct 3 on the North Side.

“As Republicans we see Obamacare as quite intrusive in our businesses and in our personal lives. It takes away our freedom of choices,” she said. Gibbons said she, too, was dismayed by Cornyn's performance.

“We'd like him to be the conservative candidate that we're looking for,” she said.